This is an excellent question with few good answers. The time to deal with the compaction issue is before you plant. Once the plants, especially trees, are in the ground, your options are limited. That is one of the biggest reasons why I am no fan of lasagna gardening. Once everything is in the ground, it is a little late to be going back to what should have been done in the first place. However, not all is lost. A reasonably easy solution to compaction problems is raised beds. Although not very common in Iowa, in places where bedrock is near the surface, you have little other choice if you want to garden. Of course, where bedrock is deep but compaction is a problem, the old solution favored by the British was to double dig their garden beds. In other words, they would remove the soil a full spade depth, set it aside and dig yet another full spade depth. Amendments were added as the bed was refilled. This is a tried and true method that works extremely well. Unfortunately, it is also backbreaking work. Most people are unwilling to expend this much energy and are looking for easier methods. Hence, the popularity of lasagna gardening; which is actually only a slight modification of Ruth Stouts method written about decades before a slick marketing name was given to it. Hey, if you are currently using the lasagna method and are pleased with the results, have at it. It is certainly much better than not gardening at all. However, be honest with yourself and realize that it does have limitations. It is not a cure-all. Quite frankly, one should have enough common sense to realize that if it sounds too good to be true  it probably is. Soil compaction is not eliminated; it is only masked to the uninformed. The way that I addressed the issue of soil compaction was to deal with it when my house was being built  a narrow window of opportunity not afforded to most of us very often. I subsoiled my entire yard to a depth of about 16 inches. (Make sure you call for the utilities to be located, first.) I then incorporated truckloads of compost into the soil as deeply as possible with a tractor-mounted rototiller. And then, most importantly, I kept all heavy vehicle traffic OFF. As I built my garden beds, I incorporated even more compost into those areas and now walk only on the paths. As to the original question of this thread: At my older homes, I eliminated grass by cutting it off with a sharp spade (a sod cutter would work well) and then threw the sod into the bottom of the beds that I was double digging. I further amended nasty, yellow clay by using an old Karen Strohbeen garden soil formula: 30% soil, 30% coarse sand & 30% compost. The soil was tilled and the results were wonderful. I gained supplementary benefits of modified raised beds due to the additional materials and air space. On existing beds, whenever I lifted plants for dividing and/or replacement, I took the opportunity to dig down and create "Karen Strohbeen soil". Of course, at times I hit big tree roots so you just do the best you can. I realize that there are many more ways to do things than the ones I have chosen. Also there are many, many other extenuating factors to consider. For one, I am a big strong guy. If I asked my wife to double dig a new garden bed, she would probably use the spade to double whack me! My preference now is to use my 40 hp tractor to pull a subsoiler. Not all people have a tractor. Some have health issues that demand they use less strenuous methods. For many of these people, lasagna gardening can provide an attractive option. However, sometimes the claims I have heard people making, approach that of a snake oil salesman. Life is full of compromises and tradeoffs  and this is just another example. Every coin has two sides. IronBelly

Note that the temperature ranges for USDA zones are averages. Zone 5 will sometimes get colder than the average annual range given for it. A plant rated hardy to Zone 5 may be quite suitable for you, depending on how accurately applied that rating was - be wary of commercial sources in particular, some of which seem to pretty consistently base ratings on zone averages rather than the true span of temperatures seen in them. A plant is hardy to -20F so they list it as being hardy to whatever zone has a range of average lows that includes -20F. This will work until it gets below -20F - which it will someday if the plant was put in a -20F to -10F area. Grass all through perennials is either dealt with by digging everything up, washing the soil off and separating out the grass by hand, or spraying the whole mess with herbicide and starting over. Or digging it all out and dumping it down a hole.

Hi Jenifer, I tried to get to the post office today before 12:00, and did actually but they were closed. Bad enough they have such stinky hours but then they had the nerve to close early on a Saturday! Ugh. Anyway I'll get my package in the mail on monday. This is only my second year trading seeds so I'm a bit of a novice. Just wondering on grass seeds, I put about three little heads of the bunny tails grass in each bag, is that good? Also I have some other taller perennial grasses the have big fronds do I just pull it all away from the main stem and shove some in a bag? Thanks. Eileen

ginnysgirl, There are no magic bullets to keep grass and broadleaf weeds out of ornamental beds, but there are methods you can employ that will help you keep them to a minimum. For grassy weeds, the best way to remove what currently is in the bed now is just to take a trowel and dig it out. Dig all of out. You cannot pull it because pulling it removes the topgrowth and leaves roots and stolons underground. New grass will begin growing from those stolons in no time at all, so dig all of them out. With the grasses you remove, don't put them on your compost pile if you have them. They will just root in and start growing there. Instead, bag them up and dispose of them in the trash. With bermuda grass I usually have to dig down 4 to 8 inches to get all the stolons out. Understand that bermuda grass can spread via three methods: by seed, by root and by stolon, so to get rid of it long-term, you have to fight it on all three fronts. Once you have dug out all the grass, including the roots and stolons, you can put down a barrier of the type of your choice, and this could be a good quality landscape fabric (woven fabric, not one of the cheap ones with millions of holes punched in it because grass comes up through those holes), cardboard or newspaper laid down 6 to 8 pages thick. Then pile mulch on top of the barrier, and the mulch should be 2-4" deep. You may have weeds and grass sprout beneath the barrier, but the barrier should prevent it from coming through. Landscape fabric, maintained properly, can last for many years. Both cardboard and newsprint decompose and break down, but they do attract earthworms (which eat them) that help improve your soil. You might get weed seeds sprouting in the mulch, but if you pull them as soon as you notice them, they'll never be able to grow long enough to send roots down through the landscape fabric. If you let them grow in the mulch and put down roots through the fabric, you'll have a big mess that is almost impossible to fix. So, for the above methods to work, you have to check your beds regularly and stop and yank out weeds when they appear. The longer you let them grow and get established the harder they are to remove. With broad-leaved (non-grassy) weeds, the process is much the same. It is very important to dig them out, and not to pull them. As with weedy grasses, broadleaf weeds often break off at the ground level when you tug on them, and then regrow from the root. To get rid of them, dig out all the root, put down a barrier and mulch. There are various herbicides that can be applied to weeds, but keep in mind that some of them are broad-spectrum and can kill anything they touch, so you must be very careful about using them around desirable plants. You wouldn't want to accidentally kill plants that you wish to keep, and it is very easy to accidentally do that. There are some over-the-top herbicides that can be sprayed on grassy weeds to kill them in ornamental beds. If you choose to use one of those, read the label very carefully. It ought to list which ornamental plants can survive being sprayed with this product. If your ornamental plants are not specifically listed on their label or website, you shouldn't use them because they'll kill desirable plants as well as the undesirable ones. There also are some pre-emergent herbicides that can prevent weeds from sprouting in bare soil. With these, you must time their application very careful as they have a limited life in the soil and must be applied to the soil shortly before the target weed seeds would begin to sprout. You would have to apply them in late summer/early fall to prevent cool-season weeds from sprouting (the exact timing depends on your exact location and when the cool-season weeds tend to sprout there) and then apply them in late winter/early spring before warm-season seeds begin to sprout. Honestly? Seeds will sprout in every single square inch of bare ground they find, so heavy mulching is the best deterrent. Second to that? An active, involved gardener who takes time weekly to dig out weeds that have sprouted. There's no easy way to keep plants out but the above two methods work for me. I generally don't use herbicides because most of the effective ones are synthetic in origin and I prefer to garden organically. The few organic pre-emergents that exist are not very effective and are not effective for a very long period of time, so I don't even bother with them. Post-emergent synthetic herbicides work well, as long as you carefully match the specific synthetic post-emergent with the type of weed you're trying to kill--whether broadleaf or grassy. There also are some broad-spectrum products that have active ingredients that kill both broad-leaf and grassy weeds, but remember they will kill everything, including your lawn and desirable trees, shrubs, groundcovers, vines, flowers, etc. Herbicide drift, and the accidental killing of desirable plants, is a huge problem in this country. Always use herbicides exactly as the label directs, and take as much care as possible not to overspray or not to use them on a windy day. The last thing you want is for your herbicide to drift through the air and kill plants belonging to other people. Herbicides, under the right conditions, can drift and easily kill plants 1/4 to 1/2 mile away. Under some conditions, they may drift a mile and kill plants. That is why you must be careful with them. I hope this helps. Dawn